Involve people in the plans for community
INCREASINGLY we read articles about hopeless communities taken hostage by gangsters or desperate school administrators facing "discipline challenges" to a point that requires psychologists' intervention. A Herald editorial ("Time to loosen gangsters' claws", June 30) also mentions "no external efforts [millions spent] could ever be enough to end this scourge unless the community frees itself from the claws of gangsterism". Indeed, but how?
It is much more than a "material poverty" that causes this frightening state of affairs. Apartheid and then the "democratic" dispensation has entrenched a top-down need/problem-based approach to development.
Communities become mere observers and consumers while external "experts" define plans to resolve issues for them. Results are appalling.
All these expanded public work programmes, multipurpose centres, sport facilities, community education and museum centres (built with loads of public funds) will remain empty shells and white elephants until people are enabled and mandated to give them some substance. Anyway it is believed a mistake to launch such programmes or construct such buildings in the first place before their content and sustainable purpose can be secured.
Besides, in four wards where urban agriculture projects have been surveyed, 95% of school gardens are unsustainable despite millions spent on them. What else is to be expected as almost none of the support entities aim to empower adequately these gardeners to become fully autonomous?
It should be recognised that this approach to development has robbed individuals of their identity, and has deprived them of their life's purpose as purveyors for their families and communities. This has festered into a state of poverty of the minds, of generalised dependency and hopelessness which is the best ground for opportune gangsterism and many other social plagues.
The alternative is a radical acknowledgment of the intrinsic value of people and local assets to be respectively the initiators and the foundation of local development. It is recognised this bottom-up approach is the only way to rebuild people's self-esteem/identity and empower them to become their own service providers, to rebuild their communities that make sense, to become resilient and initiate sustainable development.
A long process indeed but no other adequate alternative exists, I am afraid.
I have never seen in the various African countries where I worked such a top-down, disempowering and condescending system that renders individuals and communities mere beneficiaries and service consumers.
In Mozambique, for example, a decentralisation process started long ago to empower local authorities and individuals to develop themselves from the bottom up, growing local resources. A much fulfilling status, I would say, where people will need no psychology to understand and stabilise themselves.
I wonder if such a critical debate (on the need over asset developmental approach) can ever happen in NMBM one day?
PL Lemercier, Port Elizabeth
